


big city days

by hollimichele



Category: Top Ten (Comic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-25
Updated: 2011-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-28 02:22:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/302686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hollimichele/pseuds/hollimichele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frank and Leni work things out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	big city days

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Parhelion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Parhelion/gifts).



It’s spring of ‘51 when Frank tries to break up with her. Which is funny, because as far as Leni knows they haven’t, actually, been dating.

“I think you think this is something it’s not,” Frank says, a sentence that takes Leni a long moment to translate in her head, and which makes her scoff at him across the cafe table. Leni’s drinking hot chocolate; Frank, of course, hasn’t ordered anything at all. The bored-looking waiter is bending and unbending spoons, perched on his stool behind the counter.

“I think you are my friend. Maybe my best friend, after Steve. Don’t worry so much about whether I’m getting too _attached_ ,” Leni tells him. She’s got pretty good at reading Frank’s body language, such as it is, and the shift of his shoulders tells her he’s embarrassed.

“I just-- I worry about you, Leni. You spend most of your time with me and Steve and Ramon, and Ramon is married and Steve is-- taken, and I’m... not an option either. You should have someone in your life.”

“I have plenty of someones,” Leni says. “I have all the someones I need. Honestly, Frank, if I wanted to be with someone, I would be with someone. I’m not lonely.” And she’s not, really. She’s a modern woman; when she wants to have sex, she has it. She just... hasn’t wanted to, so much, just lately.

And maybe sometimes she thinks of Frank’s voice, and her brain subtracts the metallic buzz of his speakers, leaving it warm and human. So what? She knows better than to make too much of a fantasy.

Frank sighs. “Maybe I’m being stupid,” he says at last. “Sorry, Leni. I know you don’t need me to tell you how to run your life.”

She reaches out to pat him on the arm, even knowing that he can’t feel it. “It’s okay, Frank,” she says. “I know you’re just looking out for me.”

“He’s an idiot,” Steve tells her later. They’re both a little drunk, from trading shots with Wulf, since Wulf can drink them both under the table. Combined, even. Wulf’s hardly even tipsy, just a glint in his eye that tells Leni that Steve has a good night in store for him, but right now Steve’s slumped between Leni and Wulf on the sofa in Wulf’s apartment.

“It was just-- just so patronizing,” Leni tells them both, letting the anger she’s been keeping tamped down bubble up a little. “Telling me not to like him too much-- for my own good, of course! Does he hate himself so much, just because he’s-- he’s--” But Steve and Wulf don’t know Frank’s secret, of course, and even drunk she knows enough to keep Frank safe. They think he’s hung up on the injuries that keep him in his suit, that he believes no woman could ever love his imperfect human body.

Steve pats her hair clumsily. He’s even worse at holding his liquor than Leni. “He’s an idiot,” he repeats. “You’re great. You’re my favorite.”

“I thought I was your favorite,” Wulf rumbles at him, amused.

“You’re my other favorite,” Steve informs him solemnly, and Leni laughs, pushing Frank out of her head for the night.

But he creeps back in again-- he’s hard to avoid, when Leni sees him at work every damned day. She knows it’s an impossibility, but she really does care for Frank-- his wry sense of humor, his willingness to take the risks that his flesh-and-blood fellow officers can’t, even his loneliness at being the only one of his kind in Neopolis. That’s why Leni can’t keep the frisson of excitement out of her voice when she brings him the newspaper, one morning a few months later.

‘ARTIFICIAL HUMAN’ WOWS TIN TOWN, the headline reads, and there’s a picture of a pretty young woman smiling at the camera; next to her a whiskered man gestures in the manner of a visiting professor. The article’s about a Professor Dimidov, recently arrived from Mother Russia, whose work in building realistic prostheses for veterans had not attracted the right sort of interest at home, where they’d mostly wanted killer robots. So he’d defected to the States, and come to Neopolis, and as a proof of concept built a robot that looked so human that, the reporter claimed, she ‘could not be distinguished from the real thing.’

“So?” Frank asks, after he’s skimmed the article.

“So I think you should go meet her,” Leni says, softly enough that the other officers in the break room won’t hear.

“Are you-- are you trying to set me _up_ with her?” Frank asks, and he sounds affronted.

“No!” Leni says, perhaps a little too quickly. “I just-- I think it would be nice for you to have someone else around. Someone who’s like you.”

“She’s nothing like me,” Frank says, but he goes.

Leni goes with him, which she doesn’t quite mean to do, but she’s just as curious as Frank in her way. The Professor’s lab is in a converted warehouse near the shipyards, and when Leni rings the buzzer the door is opened by the young woman from the newspaper photo. “Hello! Please come in,” she greets them cheerily. “The Professor will be with you in a moment.”

Leni watches her as she moves around the little waiting-room space, tidying a stack of newspapers here, gathering up a sheaf of clipboards there. Her movements are a little too stiff to be natural, just a shade too precise to mistake her for the real thing. Up close, Leni can see how her hair is rooted like a doll’s, and the spray of freckles across her nose looks like an affectation. In the photograph, Leni could have believed she was human, but even these few minutes in person betray her. Beside her, she can see Frank’s shoulders sagging, the hopefulness draining out of his metal frame.

“Let’s get out of here, Leni,” he says quietly to her. “This is pointless.”

But before the can leave the connecting door opens, and a little bristly-bearded man with thick glasses bustles in. “Thank you, Anya, that will be all,” he says, and the robot girl nods briskly at him and leaves the room, her arms swinging mechanically by her side. “Good, isn’t she?” Professot Dimidov says. “Of course, she was a bit of a rush job-- if I had her to do over again, I’d have used a much better-quality wig, and I need to rewrite her movement programs one of these days for fluidity-- but overall I’m very happy with how she turned out.”

“And what about her brain?” Frank asks, unexpectedly harsh. “Did you spend much time on that at all?” Leni puts a hand on his arm, and he settles a little under it, but she can still sense the tension in his frame.

“Well, I did the best I could,” the Professor answers, blinking at them confusedly through his glasses. “But I’m sure you know there’s only so far we can go with artificial minds. She’s as bright as I could make her, I think, but I’ll admit she’s not much of a conversationalist.”

“What if you had a real artificial mind?” Leni asks, cutting off what’s sure to be a withering retort from Frank. “Someone sentient, as intelligent as you or I? Could you build them a body that could pass for human?”

That startles the Professor and Frank both into silence. After a long moment, Frank shifts, and says uneasily, “Leni, I don’t think we should be--”

“I don’t think that’s very funny, young lady,” the Professor says. “Such a thing is beyond me. Heaven knows I’ve tried. But Anya is the best I’ve done. What you ask for-- I think it is impossible.” There are, Leni is surprised to see, tears shining in his eyes, behind his glasses. There is a long, uncomfortable silence.

“Maybe it’s not impossible,” Frank says, much to Leni’s shock. “Maybe you just need the chance to try.”

Once brought into their confidence, Professor Dimidov is beyond ecstatic. “You are a marvel,” he tells Frank solemnly. “A miracle. The man who made you, he must have been a genius among geniuses.”

“I think he just got lucky,” Frank says, shrugging his big shoulders. “I don’t remember him being especially brilliant. He got himself blown up, after all.”

“I think he must have been special,” Leni says. “He made you, after all.”

It’s a few months later that Frank asks the Captain for medical leave. “Just a couple of weeks,” he says, knowing the news will travel around the station at damn near light-speed. “There’s a doctor I’ve been wanting to see.”

The Captain raised an eyebrow at that, Frank tells Leni later, but he approves it nonetheless. And when Leni asks for a day of personal leave, one Friday a few weeks later, he approves that too.

“Going to see Frank in the hospital?” he asks her, and she turns in the doorway and smiles.

“Something like that,” she answers.

In fact, she goes to the warehouse in Tin Town, her broom joining the stream of traffic over the city. There’s been a collision in midair above the courthouse, but Leni’s off duty and two other officers are already on the scene, hovering in place as they write out the necessary tickets, so Leni leaves them to it.

Frank is already waiting there for her. It’s the big day, after all. Anya lets her in. She walks ahead of Leni, her arms swinging loose and natural at her sides. The Professor’s been tinkering with her.

In the Professor’s lab, it looks like a mad butcher has been on the loose, and so has a mad electrician. Human limbs are scattered across the work surfaces, their stumps bristling with wires; on another table, eyeballs swivel in their sockets to watch Leni pass them by. Frank is waiting at the center of the room, with the Professor, where a man is lying asleep on the worktable, a sheet covering him from the waist down.

That’s how good the robot body is-- that Leni’s first thought is that he is a man asleep. It’s the first time she’s seen Frank’s new body. He hadn’t let her come visit while it was being built, or while the Professor wrote the programs that would let Frank’s mind inhabit it.

He has dark hair, combed neatly back. A burn scar splays across his chest and creeps up one side of his throat-- Frank had insisted on that, for verisimilitude. He looks, more or less, like the photos of Frank Chambers that Leni has seen. There are faint lines around his eyes, that Leni thinks will crease up when he smiles, but for now his face is slack and empty. Waiting.

Leni reaches out to brush a hand down one of the body’s arms. There are tiny hairs on it that catch lightly at her fingertips. The texture is indistinguishable from a person’s skin, except that it’s not warm.

“Well!” the Professor says, and claps his hands together. “Are we ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” says Frank.

It’s scary, the few minutes that Frank is powered down so that the Professor can remove his artificial brain from his suit and install it in the new body’s chest. If anything were to go wrong, Frank would be, effectively, dead-- or, at best, trapped inside a piece of metal the size of a toaster, without any input from the outside world. Professor Dimidov cradles Frank’s brain carefully in his arms as he crosses the short distance from Frank’s old body to his new one.

The chest cavity on the new body opens up, and the Professor sets to work on connecting wires. Leni leans over his shoulder to see. There’s a soft blue glow illuminating the inside of Frank’s chest, and a tangle of wires and cables cocoons the artificial brain. “Lots of new inputs,” the Professor says happily. “All sort of new senses! It’s very exciting.”

Leni find that she is holding the body’s hand-- holding Frank’s hand. The first sign she has that the Professor is done is not when he announces it, but a moment before, when the hand she is holding suddenly tightens its grip.

“Ah! There. All done but the closing up,” the Professor announces, and proceeds to do so. By the time he’s done, Frank’s eyes are open, and they focus on her when she leans over him.

“Llllleni,” he said, his voice a little slurry. “Izzat you?”

“It’s me, Frank,” she says, and smiles.

“You look different,” he says. “And sound different.” His hand tightens on hers again. “Feel different, too.”

“You too,” Leni says, which she thinks is a little stupid and obvious, but it makes Frank smile. His eyes crease up at the corners, just like she’d thought they would. “Help me up?” he says, and together they maneuver him to a sitting position. His movements are a little stiff, but she can see them becomes less so minute by minute. By the end of an hour, he’s walking around the lab, his gait even and natural.

When they come back to work the following Monday, they are holding hands. The Captain’s talking to the duty sergeant when they come in, and he quirks the corner of his mouth up when he sees them. “Welcome back, Frank,” is all he says.

Later, alone in Leni’s apartment, Frank grows nervous. “I don’t know if I can be what you want me to be, Leni,” he tells her, so earnest. “I’m still not-- not human. Not really.”

“If that mattered to me,” Leni tells him, “I wouldn’t be here.” And she wouldn’t.


End file.
